


Mad Girl's love song

by Ruler_of_Nope_Island



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Multi, S3 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2018-10-17
Packaged: 2019-08-03 11:07:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16325063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruler_of_Nope_Island/pseuds/Ruler_of_Nope_Island
Summary: Georgie ponders loss.





	Mad Girl's love song

Georgie lives in a state of absolute reality despite everything she knows. No, because of everything she knows. She shifts through her bookshelf, trying to find the book where that line comes from. Even larks and katydids are supposed to dream. She dreams. But dreams are a mix of chemicals and memories and half-thoughts and experiences so they are as real as anything else in her life. 

Cat. Mug. Editing software. Visits to the hospital. Jon lies there, surrounded by medical equipment that beeps and flashes. There are always flowers on the bedside table; brisk, pretty, and impersonal. She doesn’t think they were sent by anyone who actually knew Jon, because if you knew Jon you’d know that he hated flowers. A holdover from his Grandmother’s - always Grandmother, never Nanny or Grandma, which said a lot - funeral, where people sent flowers and pound shop cards. Flowers are what people send when they don’t care but want to look as if they did, according to him. They’d had an argument about that. One of their first. He was so hard to please, she’d said. What would have made you happy?

Nothing ever did, not really. He was occasionally satisfied and often content but never really that happy. That bothered her. That reason - one of a very long list - contributed to their break-up. After everything she didn’t feel like it was too much to ask for someone who’d be happy with her. After all, she had no fear about ending up alone.

Melanie is tearing herself apart at the seams. She’s all teeth and claws now and it’s difficult to talk to her without it turning into a rant or a long description of what she intends to do to her boss if she gets her hands on him. Violent and gruesome and repeated with such relish that it makes her glad she doesn’t feel fear anymore. You were fun once, Georgie thinks. I loved you, once. But I cannot love what you have become. What you are becoming. Jon is trapped in his own chrysalis. Something will emerge. Something that is even further removed from the Jon she knew. 

Living without fear - living in her absolute, certain, reality - is a lonely place. Georgie has tried talking to a therapist. The therapist said it sounded like she had some sort of personality disorder. Do you find it hard to love? I have a cat, Georgie said. They stared at each other. Then Georgie said: I love the wrong people. That’s a good place to start as any, the therapist said. They both tried but neither of them talked about making a second appointment.

Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results. Who said that?  
An English degree means a head full of words and sometimes no way to track them to their source. There’s a play she liked but has mostly forgotten. Two men are standing on a gallows, asking each other if there was a point where they could have said no -   
Jon and Melanie, Melanie and Jon. She doesn’t believe in destiny. But she does know that she has a type. 

Stark raving sane. Another line. That playwright got it pretty wrong about death. But something else chimes: the absence of presence. She can feel the loss of the people she loved even though they are physically in front of her. If only the capacity for hope had been taken from her as well. No fear doesn’t mean no optimism; it only means that she fully understands how bad it will hurt when things...well. Everything is ending all the time. Which means it has already ended. Each moment shatters against the next one, in the space between breaths. 

The Admiral is meowing at her. Dinner time already? The sky’s starting to darken. This moment here, this is real. A young woman thinks about the people she loves and feeds her cat. Everything is ending all the time. This is the reality that she understands, that she knows, like how people know which way is up. 

She stops looking through her bookshelf; she’ll google it later. That feeling of smallness creeps up on her. The thought that at some point she’ll stop feeling is a strange relief for once. _Absolute reality._ The people that she loved are gone. Her cat is hungry. There is editing to do. A million things breathe and move and die under her feet. And she is very, very, alone.

**Author's Note:**

> No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
> 
> -Shirley Jackson, the Haunting of Hill House.
> 
> The play Georgie is trying to remember is _Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are dead_ by Tom Stoppard
> 
> The title comes from Sylvia Plath's poem of the same name.


End file.
